As reimagined by Sir Tom Stoppard and Joe Wright, Anna Karenina seems less bothered about being barred from seeing her child than about being shunned by polite society. She can cope with being sent away on her young son's birthday; but dirty looks at the theatre tip her over the edge.

It's not surprising that a contemporary adaptation of Tolstoy's masterwork should be so taken with the social side of its protagonist's plight. An affront to motherhood may be regrettable, but at least it means that a dad gets depicted as doing his share of the parenting. On the other hand, the cold shoulder turned against an adulteress by St Petersburg's blue-bloods prompts understandable horror. They're stigmatising personal conduct, and nowadays that's just not on.

Today, we pride ourselves on being non-judgmental. So, no one's going to raise an eyebrow if you desert a spouse you've pledged to cherish until death. If, like Anna, you choose to desert your children as well, we're cool with that too. You needn't fear being called a bounder or bolter or axed from decent folk's guest lists like poor Anna. Disapproval would be more likely to beset anyone impertinent enough to question your behaviour.

Stigma is now seen only as a kind of social blight. It's considered illegitimate not just when it's penalising involuntary afflictions but also when it challenges dubious behaviour that's considered to constitute self-fulfilment. The moralists of yesteryear would have found this puzzling. They believed that only fear of the disapproval of peers can contain conduct that is too impalpable to be checked by law but can still cause serious harm. To them, the excoriation of Anna would have seemed entirely sensible. Adultery and consequential destruction of the family unit posed threats to the existing order that needed to be discouraged.

Even as Tolstoy wrote, however, the forces that would erode this kind of attitude were gathering strength. The Enlightenment had elevated individual expression at the expense of responsibility to society, while romanticism was glamorising the outsider. When it came along, cinema did much to reinforce both processes, with films like, well, Anna Karenina. While Tolstoy saw his creation as dangerous, to Stoppard and Wright she's a superstar.

Twentieth-century philosophy, psychology and politics took matters further. The concept of guilt was proscribed, and with it went shame. As a result, we may have acquired more personal freedom, but we've suffered for the privilege.

Such social control as was once exercised by the community has had to be transferred to the state, which appears to have plenty of power but lacks the moral authority enjoyed by a critical mass of like-minded citizens. This means that laws become ever more intrusive but at the same time less effective. Sometime criminals like Jonathan Aitken, Nick Leeson, Howard Marks and Mike Tyson re-emerge from supposed reprobation as celebrities. Neighbours from hell have laughed asbos out of existence.

Some maintain that there's nothing we can do about this. Before you can deploy stigma to constrain misconduct, you must construct a consensus about what's right and what's wrong. In imperial Russia, this may have been relatively straightforward. For us, it's suggested, relativism, multiculturalism and self-worship make it nigh on impossible.

Clearly we couldn't shame our own equivalents of Anna and Alexei into staying together for the children. In 19th-century St Petersburg, few wives were prepared to behave like Anna. Today, lots of us want to behave as she does, and we're not going to denounce ourselves.

Stigma works only when it's deployed against a beleaguered minority. Still, even in our own feebly permissive world, minorities can be found that we are indeed prepared to anathematise. Paedophiles encounter the unambiguous ill-will of the rest of us. Racists and rapists incur pretty universal opprobrium, and even groups like smokers and 4x4 drivers can find themselves subject to reproach.

There are other potentially vulnerable groups that attract no less odium; it's just that in their cases we shrink from backing up our loathing with action. Take bonus-hungry bankers and remuneration-rapacious chief executives. They enjoy near universal disapproval, yet we allow them to pass amongst us unpunished.

Why are they even able to show their faces in public? They ought to be snubbed by their neighbours, catcalled in the street, blackballed by clubmen, banned from bardwellsbecues and unfriended on Facebook. Protesters should obstruct their driveways and poke rude messages through their letterboxes.

This might not make them change their ways, but it might deter imitators. Either way, it could make the rest of us feel better. And after a successful start on financial pilferers, who knows what other groups of currently unchastised reprobates we might get round to picking on?

Of course, there would be casualties. Baited beyond endurance, the occasional asset-stripper might throw himself under a train. Like the good people of Anna's St Petersburg, we could probably greet any such incidents with equanimity.